Personality

Abstract

It was Mr. Hushang Ordoobadi, Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Shiraz, who proposed including inquiries about the subject’s best or happiest, worst or unhappiest memory (Q 4 and 5) in our questionnaire, so that this chapter in a real sense is his even though written by the present authors. He is, of course, not responsible for mistakes. The purpose was to gain information about our subjects’ affective valuation of actual life events they had enjoyed, endured or suffered and to investigate whether these valuations differed significantly according to such major biosocial factors as age, sex and literacy as well as from one locality to another in which were reflected predominantly rural, urban or nomadic types of culture and society. The number of variables being large already, we confined ourselves to two age groups in the sense they have been used throughout: children (including youths and maidens) up to the age of 14 and adults from 15 onwards. By asking for memories only we hoped to keep closer to tangible facts, concrete and countable realities, whereas questions about wishes, ambitions and desires would have opened the sluices to an unmanageable flood of vague, variegated and often unrealistic fantasies. It proved no easy task either to hold our subjects to the concrete recollections that were our goal. Often they could be brought back only by some insistence from flights of imagination or invective and then sometimes shirked the point by saying they had neither good nor bad recollections — a circumstance to which we shall return.